Democrats and the National Security State -- Glenn Greenwald nails it.

I've been amazed and disappointed for a long time at how the most slavishly partisan media Democrats who pretended to care so much about these issues when doing so helped undermine George Bush are now the loudest apologists and cheerleaders for these very same policies.
If they started a club called Liberal Pundits to Defend the National Security State, no auditorium in the country would be large enough to accommodate them.
To call them principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic is to be overly generous. -- Glenn Greenwald
This is why Wall Street, in general, there are specific exceptions, have no problem with the Democratic Party. Having a Democrat in the White House or the party controlling one house or both means liberals and progressives shut up.

I've seen this mentality since the Clinton administration. It's a "for the greater good" philosophy that holds that it's okay to do corrupt or evil things as long as it allows you to achieve something positive. We see this now during the recent scandal revelations where people feel that it is better to support the administration on everything they do wrong because then they will be in a better position to do things that are right. More principled people reject this philosophy.

OP - considering it was a Democrat who deregulated the financial sector, Wall Street may actually prefer a Democrat in the White House.

R3
Don't forget NAFTA.
Here are some issues the Democrats and Obama have support:
Cuts to Social Security through chained CPL.
Breaking the last of union strength -- the unions for public employees.
Privatizing public education and making it a marketable item run for profit.
Expansion of the security state.
Protection of Wall Street's criminals and their profits.
Is this a Chamber of Commerce/Republican wish list or what?

haven't you stupid american fags figured it out yet?
they all work for corporate and banks
LOL ROFLMAO it's true what they say,you americans ARE morons
hahahaha
here's newsflash-multiculturalism is about slave wages and killing unions(via destruction of homogenous societies)
feminism-slave wages/destruction of family/education/raising tax collections
gay pride-distraction/destruction of nuclear family/cohesion
anti-catholic=vs family unit
black family was destroyed on purpose via flooding ghettos with drugs
communism=fascism=marxist----corporate rule--feudalism
no WMDs,democracy(idiocracy for you stupid americans),brit royals-kings of opium trade(afganistan remember,stupids);
anglo-saxon-yiddish aristocracy based in UK rules the world/owns the FED of yours you piggies
USA-the colony for labour/cannon fodder for royals of europe,same for russian federation(notice both are FED,hehe)
hahaha stupid fat yanks you never learn hahahaha
:P

Greenwald is operating under the false assumption that Democrats are liberals.

What the hell is R5 talking about???

Anonymous

Glenn Greenwald is an Obama-bashing Koch-sucker libertarian funded by the Cato Institute. He's also a grotesque hypocrite and racist tool, who "trusted" Bush on the Iraq War and Patriot Act, and only now finds it all abhorrent when there's a black man in Office. He's been trying to undermine Obama since day one.

R5 nailed it, actually.

LOL ROFLMAO, R5.

The silence of women's groups about the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal was deafening.

R9 nailed it.

Greenwald rips both Democrats and Republicans. But unlike most journalists, he doesn't gush over The Perpetual Fabulousness of Our All-Knowing President so naturally he makes members of the the Obama Peanut Gallery (like r9) squeal and sputter with indignation.
Here, Greenwald deliciously bitchslaps Ari Fleicher - hard.
(When Ari Fleischer is your go-to guy to defend a policy, you know that policy can't be a good one)

Libertarians (and crazies like R5) are like stopped clocks: They may be right twice a day, but it's for the wrong reasons.

R9, do you have some sources or links for that? Glenn Greenwald has been articulate and responsive to questions in TV interviews I've seen recently. I've been quite impressed with him.

R9:
Let's leave the ad hominem stuff. Do you have anything of substance to counter this position?
-- Liberals and progressives tolerate policies from a Democratic president that would have them marching in the streets in outrage if there was a Republican in the White House. Wall Street finds that situation useful.
Well?

[quote]There are some nuggets of truth in [R5]'s giant pile of crazy.
Undigested nuts, shit, etc.

I%27m%20sorry%2C%20was%20that%20ad%20hominem%3F%20%20Fuck%20off.

No that was not ad hominem. Perhaps you should check the definition.
Also it was not a meaningful reply, so I guess you agree -- Wall Street finds Obama a very useful president, and liberals/progressives go along with programs they would hate from a Republicans.
Wall Street finds the cover from the White House convenient. Very convenient.
When 2016 comes around, Wall Street will get rich with Hillary or someone else of either party. We will continue to get screwed.

Speaking of nuts...

R15 R16
tell me which part exactly is crazy you naive useful idiot morons
''libertarians'' democrats,conservatives,republicans,nazis,commies,....GOD!
don't you get it!?these are all just buzzwords.
give them bread and circuses-julius caesar if i'm not mistaken
the job of your ''elected'' parliaments is to follow the orders of aristocracy
prime minister of uk ''consults'' the monarch once a week.what do they talk?pancakes?
other party head i heard ''consults'' Lord Rothschild(relative of monarchs of europe-they are all related)
bilderberg anyone?started by prince of denmark or holland can't remember.attended by yours rockeffelers and other aristocrats-hapsburgs,lords,barons,bushes etc.
syria,lybia,egypt,iraq,now Iran
haven't you noticed how all of a sudden all media cares about is some ''human rights'' in countries rich with resourses and independent governments that don't kiss royal ass?
north korea-death camps,horror-not a peep.my guess-it's there to control japan or china,prolly has nukes.regime instituted by anglo-saxon-yiddish elite based in britain
the reason they can do this is demonstrated by this thread:idiot paesants buy the circuses.
don't you notice how everything is so convenient?we (the west) all so good,''they''(who don't give resourses for cheap) are soooo bad and ,like, tolly undemocratic
dear god(and i'm gay and atheist,but still) how naive ARE you.are you fuckn serious?obama bush ...etc.what the hell is the difference???
didin't you notice how you moron arericos are getting poor, and all the cash goes to the top no matter what sock puppet is in the parliament???
what difference if the PUPPET MASTER IS THE SAME!?
HAHAHAHA

used%20condom

Cue the "would you rather have had Romney" trolls. It is the last gasp of the Obama-bots.

Would I rather have Romney/Bush and Darth Cheney than Obama-absolutely not.

Lawrence O'Donnell has been one that's most deeply disappointed me on this. From the very first days, he's had David Axelrod (!) on defending the government spying and handling of leakers. He's lost all credibility with me.
Contrast to Rachel Maddow, who has had commendable skepticism of the goverment line, and asked the right questions immediately (such as are these leaks really as traitorous and damaging to anti-terrorist operations as the goverment was immediately claiming.

Robert Scheer:
For contractors, the U.S. officials who write them mega checks, and the media hawks, the game is threat inflation, Booz Allen is the company, under contract with the NSA, that employed Snowden. His revelation of B.A.'s enormously profitable and pervasive spying now threatens the firm its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.
BA, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has substituted terrorist for communist as the enemy . A difficult switch for the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned.
Just when good times for war profiteers seemed to be over, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.
Rising to the defense of NSA snooping on a scale never before imagined in human history, they warn us that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, we would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off:
“I believe that if there is one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving nuclear material—it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it,” -- T. Friedman
Never has this country been as vulnerable to foreign attacks as when the founders approved our Constitution with its Fourth Amendment and other protections against an intrusive government. They did cpnvinced that individual freedom makes us stronger rather than weaker. They trusted in the wisdom of the people as opposed to the pundits who deride it.
Defending Friedman, Keller wrote:
“The important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”
So it’s the panicky public’s fault and not the ill-informed work of establishment journalists like Friedman, who led the charge to war with Iraq based on phony claims about terrorism.
Once again, Friedman has a misplaced faith in the work of NSA. Snooping was extensive before 9/11 and certainly before the Marathon attack but did not prevent either. Our much-vaunted spy agencies still have not come up with an explanation of how 19 hijackers, 15 from our ally Saudi Arabia, managed enter this country and learn to fly on NSA's watch.
NSA has not explained why the only the countries that recognized the Taliban government sponsors of al-Qaida were that same Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and UAE. For information on the UAE connection, the NSA might check with its buddies at B.A.
NYT: “When the UAE wanted to create its own NSA, it turned to B.A. It was a natural choice: The chief architect of B.A.’s cyber strategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the NSA and pushed the U.S. into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster UAE, which helps track the Iranians.”
Tracking Iranians? But they’re not the enemies who did 9/11. They are Shiites, hostile to the Sunni fanatics of al-Qaida. That makes sense if you follow the money that the UAE can pay. “They are teaching everything,” one Arab official told NYT about B.A.’s staffers. “Data mining, web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”
Now, it’s not just the U.S. but those everywhere, even in desert emirates, that can mine our data.
“The NSA data mining,” Keller assures us, “is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of of other rewards.”
Behold McConnell. While director of national intelligence from 2007-09, he did much to inflate the threat of cyberterrorism; he then returned to the private sector and was rewarded with $4.1 million his first year back at B.A, solving the problem he had hyped while heading the NSA. There’s a guy who knows how to play the game.

There's a bigger question behind this controversy: Why does the United States believe that it needs such an enormous security apparatus--and a military bigger than all of the world's other militaries combined?

They've told you over and over again why R27. They believe they rule the world, or could rule the world. They think the technology to control all the people all the time now exists.
They've told you this a thousand times in a thousand ways but still you don't listen to clear evidence of psychosis.

R27:
Read through R26 and think about how the power structure works.
As R28 says, the U.S. seeks power. It does this around the world to secure access to wealth. Some places it is natural resources such as oil or natural gas. Some countries have bottle necks for energy transportation. Other countries keep labor costs low so clothes makers like Nike and clothes vendors like WalMart can make profits.
Most of these countries have people who are very poor. The people are not dumb. They would like to have a higher minimum wage, unions, and legal protection for working conditions, but that means Nike makes less money. Our government through guns and foreign aid protects Nike and all the other companies working overseas.
These people don't like the situation and they fight back. Then we sell their leaders gas grenades and guns to put down their own people. We send their leaders billions in foreign aid so they can bribe their lieutenants and goons to keep their people in line. In turn they torture and imprison people our CIA sends them. That was one racket Mubarak of Egypt had going -- being the hatchet man for our intelligence services.
The investors who own the companies that make profits from exploiting those countries, own the arms companies. The worse the conditions get in other countries, they more they make on tennis shoes. The worse things get the more money they make by selling guns.
If somebody in the U.S. says it would be better to build schools instead of gas grenades and water cannons, the NSA wants to know.

This says it even better.
He Was Asked An Arrogant Question. His Great Answer Shows The Problem With How The U.S. Functions.